Transport Phenomena

Course goals

The overall aim of the course is to deepen the student’s understanding of how transport phenomena pose fundamental limits to the applications of nanomaterials. Upon completing the course, students will be able to:

• Derive differential equations to describe the transport phenomena of mass, heat and momentum.
• Obtain analytical expressions to predict profiles of concentration, temperature and velocity in simple geometries for both steady-state and time-dependent problems.
• Model the simultaneous transport of mass, heat and momentum in complicated geometries with the software COMSOL Multiphysics.

Content

Brief course content
Diffusion-limitations are abundant in everyday life, biology, and technology. Take the addition of sugar to tea. The sugar requires several minutes to fully dissolve, but if stirred, can dissolve in seconds. Mixing overcomes the slow diffusion.
In the realm of nanomaterial science and technology, similar diffusion-limitations restrict how fast batteries can be charged, how rapid microchips can perform computations, how much water can flow through a polymer membrane, and how efficient catalyst particles are used during chemical reactions.
Transport phenomena provides essential knowledge for understanding diffusion limitations. In this course, we discuss three closely related topics: fluid dynamics, heat transfer, and mass transfer. Fluid dynamics involves the transport of momentum, heat transfer deals with the transport of energy, and mass transfer is concerned with the transport of chemical species. These processes frequently occur simultaneously in nanomaterials: For instance, the flow of reactants around a packing of catalyst particles includes transport of mass, heat and momentum. Within individual porous catalyst particles, diffusion and chemical reactions take place simultaneously. In batteries, lithium-ions diffuse from anode to cathode, while ohmic losses generate heat.
This course provides you knowledge and practical tools to quantify transport limitations in your research. Moreover, you may find inspirations to design nanomaterials that maximize the transport of heat, mass and momentum. Such nanomaterials are urgently needed to enhance renewable energy technologies, to combat water-scarcity, and to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by the chemical industry.

Place in the curriculum
This course provides complementary knowledge to the courses “Nanomaterials for Sustainability”, “Advanced Catalysis” and “Synthesis of Catalysts and Energy Materials”. More theoretical considerations about  transport phenomena are provided in the courses “Nonequilibrium Systems”, “Fundamentals of Soft Matter” and “Colloidal Dispersions”.